Brian Mulroney's success in leading the Progressive Conservative Party to a second majority victory in the general election of 1988 was the last hurrah of the old Conservative Party, the party whose lineage extended back to the great days of the Liberal Conservatives of the 19th century, under the leadership of Sir John A. Macdonald. It is ironic that the party's final electoral victory was in aid of the implementation of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement that had been negotiated between the Mulroney government and the Reagan Administration.

On election night in January 2006, Jack Layton declared that Canadians had "voted out of hope for change" and expressed the conviction that the NDP caucus, 29 MPs as compared with 19 in 2004, would help place working people and seniors "at the front of the line" where they belong.

Layton has been proved stunningly, embarrassingly wrong, however. The Harper minority government has turned out to be more insistently, stubbornly right-wing than anyone predicted. On child care, Harper did exactly what he said he would do -- he scrapped the national program. On the Kelowna Accord, the Conservatives have scuppered an historic deal that had been years in the making, and that would have provided billions of dollars in development capital for Aboriginal peoples.

The scandal over possible electoral fraud is firing in many directions.

The back-and-forth in Parliament is dizzying.

The opposition puts questions to the government to which we often get complete non sequiturs as answers.

On Thursday, the Prime Minister's Parliamentary Secretary, Dean Del Mastro, quoted the same supposed letter from a British Columbia Liberal candidate, about robocalls originating in the United States, on at least three different occasions, in answer to three entirely different questions!

NDP MP Charlie Angus finally had to say, "I don't think the member opposite was listening to the question!"

He was listening; he just did not feel obliged to respond. He had his rehearsed lines, and he never strayed from them.

In 2009, the Conservatives distributed flyers that said Montreal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler had attended the "overtly anti-Semitic" 2001 human rights conference in Durban, South Africa.

Leaving aside the question of whether the criticism of Israel at that event did or did not slip over into what could be called anti-Semitism, associating Irwin Cotler with any kind of anti-Semitism is more than a bit absurd.

Cotler's main work, prior to politics, was as a law professor at McGill and expert on human rights.

At McGill he headed a human rights institute.

But Cotler was also very active in the Canadian Jewish community, and served a term as president of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

Perfesser Dave said it best yesterday: "Democracy is undemocratic when it gets in the way of free market choices." But Perfesser Dave was joking.

Perfesser Walker of the Fraser Institute said it first, in the Globe and Mail on Nov. 23, and he wasn't joking.

Michael Walker is sort of like the godfather of the Fraser Institute, the Vancouver-based "think-tank" whose far-right nostrums are quoted reverentially by Canadian media as if Dr. Walker had personally carried them down from Mount Sinai engraved on a tablet of stone by the finger of a wrathful and vengeful neo-Con deity.